Well read it. It just identifies sources, nothing more. If the bot report turns out to be a false positive then the report can be downvoted and hidden.

Steem Power is locked Steem, which in turn is the traded token. When you power down Steem Power, you get 1/104 of the amount in Steem tokens per week. Steem Dollars also trade on Poloniex and Bittrex, and SD/SP can trade against each other on the internal exchange.

No. 1/2 Steem Dollars which are immediately tradeable and 1/2 in Steem Power which can only be cashed out gradually over 2 years (average holding time of one year). Steem Power gives voting influence on the site while you are holding it.

Correct. The only payments were for bounties for mining software (not to me).

balance: 458951.354894133816, unlocked balance: 458951.354894133816

It's not a lie when people are actually making that much. Didn't you make $3K or something?

The aspect of it that does border on deceptive to me is combining all the rewards into a single number when no one gets that much and even the author's portion is split between SP/SD. Personally I'd just display the author's SD portion and state that you get a matching amount in SP (and that voters also get a smaller reward). I suggested something like this earlier but it was rejected in favor of the sexier big numbers. My approach would show lower numbers on the web site but they would still be pretty high (there is one post on track to get $40K now; if it showed $15K instead that would still be a "wow" number).

FIFY

Sure

I don't know the witness security thing but the main direction on security seems to be account recovery. This approach accepts that keys will be compromised but makes it less costly. Already there is a system where a compromised account can be returned to its original owner. Next up will be time locked access controls so if an account is compromised, limits apply to the amount of funds that can be removed from the account before it is recovered (this already applies to Steem Power and will be added to the other asset times). The final form of recovery that is planned is being able to designate a group of friends and family (essentially a form of multisig) who can approve recovery from lost keys (including death of the owner without leaving access to the keys to anyone).

Recently it was changed to generate exclusively high entropy passwords.

I don't know what the founders are doing with their personal accounts but the steemit account (by far the largest) sometimes powers down and sometimes doesn't. No one is "cashing out $2 million every week".

They do this to create liquid steem that is used to fund new accounts (2/3) and is sold to fund development (1/3). So far on the latter this is their only source of funding (there was a small angel round a while back but I'm sure that is long since exhausted).

When available liquid steem is sufficient they turn off the power down  (which makes sense to preserve wealth). It has been switched on and off a few times now.

My guess is that with the high level of exposure and high demand for new accounts, the need for liquid steem is high and power down will stay enabled, but I haven't seen the numbers so this is just a guess.

The 9-1 ratio between SP and Steem never changes. I'm pretty sure what he means by the "high interest rate" is the numerical reduction in the rate of effective interest as the supply increases.

Example starting with a supply of one coin:

Add first coin (interest/inflation is 100%)
Add second coin (interest/inflation is 50%)
Add fourth coin (interest/inflation is 33 1/3%)
etc.

Yes you can voluntarily reduce your power per vote (I do this occasionally in the CLI) but then you are effectively transformed into a to a group of smaller stakeholders (using 1/10 the vote power as your base vote weight, you can vote as if you were 10 stakeholders each at 1/10 size).

Registration is open.

Furthermore closing registration is pretty much the very last thing a Ponzi scheme would ever want to do.

I'm not convinced much changes if you divide into N like-minded segments. More relevant ranking results, yes. But still stake-weighting means that the few will have the bulk of the influence.

If the issue is the eventual distribution then the current whales and their stakes don't really matter. Either stake-weighed systems work, or they don't (and maybe they don't, but we don't know that).

Honestly I really think crypto nerds are highly obsessed with the whole issue of flattening the rewards and influence and whales and such. Users sign up, post, have fun, vote, get a few bucks, stare in awe at what the stars are getting, and they're basically going to be happy with it. So far that bears out.

It isn't really going to be a site to make a steady living for non-stars. Just like how Instagram has a few stars who essentially make their living on it, even if not paid directly, but most users don't. It provides infotainment (like other social web sites) and some rewards to keep it a bit more interesting (unlike other social web sites). And even the small rewards distribute at least starter amounts cryptocurrency which people can use. Potentially orders of magnitude more than have ever seen it before. Should be interesting.

The number of people voting will probably increase much more than the number of blog posts in the short term, because the site is currently dominated by active bloggers. Longer term it will probably converge where they increase at a comparable rate.

No, rewards for posting are a lot higher than for mining.

Of course, but active users don't stay entry level for long. Look at the above charts. There are 1700 people with 1 MV (= 230 SP) and 500 with 10x that.


Ah, but look, already with the relatively tiny user base the top posts have 500-700 votes. Multiply the user base by 100 and they will have not 500 votes by 50000 votes.

Volume does matter, because there are only a small number of whales and they can only vote a limited number of times. When there are more users, there votes will count proportionally more. There is no quadratic weighting by user, only by post. When there are 100x as many users voting on posts, the influence of whales will decline by at least 10x.

Mark my words, as the site grows "whale sightings" will become rare. Watch it happen. I already notice the change taking place.


Remember the steemit account is explicitly being distributed to entry level users and to buyers (who mostly won't be whales).